Pamela VanHaitsma

Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute

Professional Bio

Pamela VanHaitsma is the Director of Graduate Studies in Communication Arts and Sciences and an associate professor of CAS and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Dr. VanHaitsma’s interdisciplinary scholarship bridges rhetoric, archives, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education (University of South Carolina Press, 2019) and The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers (Ohio State University Press, 2024). Her scholarship has been recognized with the 2015 Charles Kneupper Award from the Rhetoric Society of America, the 2020 Winifred Bryan Horner Book Award Honorable Mention from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, the 2021 Randy Majors Memorial Award from the National Communication Association’s (NCA) Caucus on GLBTQ Concerns, the 2025 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award from the NCA’s Public Address Division, and the 2026 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Pamela is currently writing her third book about Rachel Carson and queer memory.